Evariste Galois (1811-1832)
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The Evariste Galois Archive
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Math93
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Fictionalization
At the age of 20, Evariste Galois
was mortally wounded in a duel (with either
Perscheux d'Herbinville or Ernest Duchatelet)
over a young lady called
Stéphanie-Félice Poterin du Motel.
Left for dead, Galois (who had no seconds) was discovered by a local peasant
and transported to the Cochin hospital in Paris,
where he died from peritonitis the next day (May 31, 1832).
To his brother Alfred, he had whispered:
Ne pleure pas.
J'ai besoin de tout mon courage pour mourir à 20 ans.
Please don't cry. I need all my courage to die at twenty.
Held on June 2, the funerals of Galois were attended by more than 2000 people and served
as a focal point of republican riots which lasted for several days.
His dubious status as a martyred activist could have remained Galois' main claim
to fame had it not been for his wish to have his last mathematical papers reviewed by
Gauss or Jacobi... His brother, Alfred Galois
and his closest friend Auguste Chevalier
did send out copies of the work, which were apparently ignored by
the originally intended recipients.
In 1842, one of these copies reached
Joseph
Liouville (1809-1882) who finally published
what is now known as Galois Theory, in 1846.
The story is poignant enough as it is, but some biographers are perpetuating the
myth that Galois wrote feverishly all he knew about
Group Theory on the night before the fateful duel, apologizing again and
again for not having the time to do it better...
The leading offender is clearly E.T. Bell (1883-1960) who wrote an emphatic chapter
in his popular 1937 collection of biographies entitled
Men of Mathematics.
Actually, there's only one occurence of such a statement
in all the mathematical manuscripts of Galois
(an "author's note" about an incomplete proof).
Otherwise, the myth seems entirely based on the following sentence which appears in the
letter known as "Galois' Testament",
dated May 29, 1832 and addressed to his friend Auguste Chevalier.
The passage is about what Galois called ambiguity theory
(now associated with Riemann Sheets).
Mais je n'ai pas le temps,
et mes idées ne sont pas encore
bien développées
sur ce terrain, qui est immense.
But I am running out of time, and my ideas are not yet
sufficiently developped
in this field, which is immense.
Until the age of 12, Galois had been schooled entirely by his mother,
Adélaïde-Marie Demante Galois.
Galois was then enrolled at Louis-le-Grand
(the most prestigious lycée of Paris)
as a boarder in the quatrième grade,
on 6 October 1823.
He took his first mathematics class there (under M. Vernier) in Februay 1827
and became enthralled with the subject.
In 1828-1829, Galois was a Mathématiques Spéciales student
under Louis
Richard (1795-1849) at Louis-le-Grand.
Athough he never published anything himself, Richard was an outstanding teacher of
mathematics, in the French
Grandes Ecoles tradition which is still enduring to this day
(see Lucien Refleu, 1920-2005).
Besides Galois, Louis Richard also taught
Urbain
Le Verrier (1811-1877),
Joseph
Serret (1819-1885) and
Charles
Hermite (1822-1901).
In April 1829, on the recommendation of Louis Richard,
Galois had his first paper published
(Proof of a Theorem on Periodic Continued
Fractions) in the Annales de
Gergonne.
On May 25 and June 1, 1829, Galois submitted to the Academy his early research
on equations of prime degree
(such an equation is solvable by radicals if and only if
all its roots are rational functions of any two of them). He was 17.
Normal Subgroups
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Galois Rings.
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Galois Fields
 
Ernest Vessiot (1865-1952)
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L'œuvre scientifique
de M. Ernest Vessiot by Elie Cartan (1947)
In the 1884
entrance exam to the Ecole Normale Supérieure,
Vessiot was second only to
Jacques
Hadamard (1865-1963) who was subsequently a classmate of his.
After graduation,
Vessiot held several teaching positions, starting at Lyon in 1887,
then Lille (1892) Toulouse, Lyon again and Paris (1910).
In 1914, he succeeded François Cosserat (1852-1914; X1870)
as president of the
Société Mathématique de France.
Vessiot would hold the post of director of the
Ecole Normale Supérieure
until his retirement in 1935.
He was elected to the Académie des Sciences in 1943.
Ernest Vessiot obtained his doctorate in 1892, under
C. Emile Picard
(1856-1941)
with a dissertation about the action of continuous groups of transformations
(Lie groups) on the independent solutions of a differential equation.
In that domain, he would later extend results of
Jules Drach (1902) and
Elie Cartan (1907).
Mathematical Genealogy
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Correlator
Jules Drach (1871-1949)
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Work of Jules Drach
Like Jacques Hadamard earlier,
Jules Drach did his doctoral work at
Ecole Normale Supérieure under the supervision of
Jules Tannery
himself an alumnus of the "Taupe Laplace"
(Lycée Malherbe de Caen) and a doctoral student of Charles Hermite.
Mathematical Genealogy
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Rues de Ludres
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Yves Glénisson (1962)
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Yves-Edouard Glénisson (1929-)
Doris Glénisson
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Genealogy
Yves Glénisson is a Belgian mathematician who
was born in Louvain (Belgium) on May 3, 1929.
He inherited the title of Roman Count
which had been granted in 1902 to his great-grandfather
Edouard-Antoine Glénisson (1837-1904) by pope
Leo XIII along with the above
arms
(inspired from the Kinschot arms).
Thus, the mathematician didn't bear his Belgian family arms:
De sable, à la croix pattée d'or cantonnée
de douze abeilles du même, posées en pal.
Yves Glénisson is best remembered for
a new way to compute the roots of a polynomial
which he published with Léon Derwidué, in 1959.
Yves Glénisson & Léon Derwidué,
Une nouvelle méthode de calcul des zéros des polynômes
Acad. Roy. Belg. Bull. Cl. Sci. (5) 45 (1959) pp. 197-204.
Thanks to Doris Glénisson (eldest daughter of Yves)
for her private comminications.
McNamee
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Householder & Stewart, 1971
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Glénisson
& Derwidué, 1960 (pdf, 2485 kB)
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